I bought 2 identical Acer laptops for family members and they were about $950 a piece.

Yeah, Acer's fine as long as you get their higher-end stuff (Ferrari and Cinema lines come to mind as good quality units). The amount of junkware that they install is frustrating, though. I don't like booting up a unit, opening Task Manager, and seeing 85 processes running on a fresh install

With the problems Toshiba has been having lately, I wouldn't touch anything they make w/ a 10-foot-pole until they fix their quality control issues. So many DOAs, it's not even funny and it's not like they have a stellar long-term reliability record, either.

The Dell Inspiron 1420s have been having issues like crazy. However, the Inspiron 1525 and XPS M1330 that we sell have been above average.

HP has been very good the past few quarters. Compaqs have a few more issues than HP due to the cheaper components used, but overall, they're still above average.

Sony is good as always, though their support is definitely the absolute worst in the industry.

We just started selling Gateway, so I don't have a lot of history or experience w/ problems, but the units we have seem pretty decent for the coin.

We get a surprisingly high number of Apple laptops back w/ hardware problems, especially the Macbooks. I'm quite fond of the Macbook Pro, though.